Sarah's Window (22 page)

There was little chance for them to talk that afternoon. Sarah's day was a busy one, feeding lunch to the youngest and taking her in the stroller into the village while she ran errands, then picking up the boys from school and walking them home, and overseeing their homework, and the eldest son's piano lesson on the Pleyel in the salon with the young music instructor from Prague (he played Brahms's
Hungarian Dance
for them), and then there was dinner and getting the children bathed and into bed. Joy did not meet Frederic de Beauharnais but she met the lady of the house, briefly, at the end of the day in the vast book-lined salon that functioned as informal dining room and family room and office. Victoria was on the telephone when Sarah came in, but she took a minute out from her conversation and welcomed Joy, then exchanged a few words with Sarah. Joy was a little disappointed, had expected a great beauty, not this rather ordinary matron, a little on the heavy side, with broad shoulders and a square, Slavic face and pale hair.

All afternoon Joy's thoughts were dancing around this news of a baby, but it wasn't until late that evening when she heard what the doctors had said (Sarah had seen several of them since her first visit), heard all about the improbabilities of such things happening, and heard, at last, Sarah's confession.

Joy was in bed, knees tucked under her chin, watching Sarah stack kindling in the fireplace to start a fire.

"I loved him," Sarah said quietly, without the slightest trace of regret. "I think it began that night Amy called and I went over there, and I fell asleep with Will in his study. From the moment I opened my eyes and saw him staring down at me..."

The bed creaked and Sarah looked over her shoulder.

"Are you falling asleep?"

"Hardly," answered Joy.

Sarah dusted off her hands and set a match to the newspaper she had stuffed beneath the kindling, then waited for the wood to ignite. "We never talked about it," she said quietly. "We just knew it was there, between us. It didn't need words."

The kindling began to blaze and Sarah laid a log on the fire. "We were only together once. Just one night. After that..." She paused, remembering. "He's a good man, Joy, and a moral one, and I think it was very hard for him. It was hard for me, too. I didn't want my happiness at the price of someone else's."

"Does he know?"

Sarah hesitated, staring silently into the fire. Joy thought perhaps she had not heard, and so she repeated it. "Sarah, does he know? About the baby?"

Joy saw her shoulders rise in a deep sigh, and her head swung from side to side.

"No."

"Well, are you going to tell him?"

"I've thought about it. So many times. But I wouldn't know what to say. It's a very delicate situation, isn't it?"

"Honey, he's got to know."

Sarah picked up the poker and nudged the log into place. "Does he?"

"What do you mean?"

"It would be awful, if he left her because he felt obligated."

"But he loves you."

"Yes, but I'm not sure he knows what to do about it." Sarah smiled a little sadly, then glanced up at Joy, a candid look on her face. "What do you do with love, Joy? Where do you go with it? Where does it take you?"

They were silent for a long while. Outdoors the plaintive call of an owl marked the silence.

"But what about the baby?" Joy asked. "He wanted a child so badly, didn't he?"

"I think so... especially later, when Will improved. He loved Will very much." She hung up the poker and turned to look at Joy. "But then, we never talked again, after Will died."

There was a long pause, and the flames crackled in the silence.

"Sometimes I hate him for that," she whispered.

Joy sat up in bed. "Oh, honey, you can't blame him; he tried so hard to save him."

"Not for that," she said in a voice paper thin.

"I don't understand."

Sarah looked down again, seemed to be contemplating her hands, the long slender fingers, the cuticles stained with paint. "I didn't have anyone to grieve with. I was alone. I felt Will's death just like I'd felt my own child's. It was all there again for me and I had to bear up alone. The father was gone, and there I was with all this sadness. This unbearable sadness. If he'd just called, or written, or done anything to let me know he felt it as deeply as I did."

"You know he did."

"And then sometimes I think, what if I lose this baby? What then?"

"Don't talk like that."

"But I think about it all the time. It's like I'm waiting for things to flip around and for it all to come crumbling down. Then what would be the point of him knowing?"

Sarah rose abruptly, replaced the fire screen, and announced with determined cheerfulness that she was going to have a shower. She peeled off her sweater and bared her stomach to Joy, and Joy placed her hand on the baby and smiled. Sarah's mood brightened then, and she disappeared behind the wicker screen and stepped into the shower, all the while babbling on over the noise of the spray, telling Joy about the work she was doing.

"I'm doing some documentation for the botanical garden in Paris. On my day off I go in and do sketches of their exotic plants. They're really pleased with my work. And they're so nice to work with. I'm very excited about it."

She turned off the water and stepped out and grabbed her towel, peeked around the wicker folding screen.

"Are you still awake or am I talking to the walls?"

"Half 'n' half," Joy mumbled from the bed.

"I also had an offer from a publishing house that specializes in natural history. They wanted to send me down to the Pyrenees in the spring to do a series of brochures on the wildlife and the flowers, but of course I won't be able to go."

She stepped out from behind the screen and walked naked across the room to the armoire and opened it. Joy watched her, thinking of all the times she had seen her scurry back and forth in the Cassoday Cafe with plates of the daily special, and that was always the way Joy had seen her, that was her Sarah. Now, here she was with swollen stomach and breasts, the firelight glistening on her skin, reaching for her nightgown, slipping it over her head and closing the door of the armoire. She stood in front of the mirror brushing her hair, and Joy couldn't imagine a man on the face of the earth who wouldn't fall in love with her.

Sarah turned all of a sudden, hairbrush in hand, and said, "Don't think I'm deluding myself. I know what the risks are, trying to have another baby. I've been told by enough doctors, but I try not to let it get me down. I just pray a lot and hope for the best. I have confidence in Dr. Faure. He's the one who introduced me to Victoria. They're close friends."

Joy shot up in bed. "You're not planning on having the baby over here, are you?"

"Yes."

"But why?"

Sarah paused and lowered the hairbrush. "You don't see why?"

"No! I don't!" Joy sat up in bed. "What reason could you possibly have for staying here? You've got no family or friends here."

Sarah's face clouded. "I just couldn't go back," she whispered, and Joy saw that this newfound happiness, although real, was fragile. "Think about it, Joy. Just think about it for a moment. All the implications. Especially for my grandparents. Not to mention John and Susan, and Billy. Everybody knows everybody. It'd be a slap in the face to all of them."

"Bunch of hypocrites."

"I don't begrudge them their feelings, Joy. I was raised like they were, with the same kind of scorn for adultery. And it's more than just John. It's Will's death, and everything that happened to me before John... with Anthony. I came home in this state once before." She grew silent and started picking nervously at her hairbrush.

"I'm sorry, honey," Joy said gently. "I didn't mean to open old wounds."

"I just can't do it. The very thought of going back sends waves of darkness over me."

"Oh, honey..."

"It's not like I have any great affection for this place as opposed to any other place." She picked up her damp towel, draped it over the radiator, then turned again to look at Joy. "It's so different from what I know. I used to see trees as an eyesore," she said with a smile, and Joy could see the sadness lifting. "But I am growing to like it. I'm beginning to like it very much." She turned off the lamp next to her chair and came to bed.

"My feet are cold," she warned as she crawled in next to Joy.

"You keep them off me."

Sarah giggled and then they settled down.

The fire had burned low, and the room had fallen into darkness. A moment passed, and she turned to Joy and whispered, "It's just that I'm happy now, and I guess that's how we judge a place, isn't it? Not for what it is, but for what we are when we live there."

But Joy's breathing had slowed and deepened; she had fallen asleep.

Sarah smiled. "'Night, my friend," she whispered.

Autumn brought the smell of burning leaves and wood smoke, and the crack of hunters' rifles in the nearby forest. The forest within the estate was a designated wildlife reserve, but poaching was common and Monsieur Cassat, the groundskeeper, spent many a sleepless night stalking trespassers and confiscating the kills they abandoned as they fled his searchlight. More than once Sarah had seen him coming out of the woods in the morning, scowling grimly, a wild boar slung over his shoulder and blood dripping onto his boots.

Very gradually the seasons passed, marked by the changing colors of the countryside and a forest mottled with crimson and gold. The winters here were green and mild compared to those in the Flint Hills, and even when the leaves had fallen and the forest stood brown and unclothed, there were still blue firs and pines and moss-covered rocks to gentle the eye, and the grasses sustained their greenness and did not die out. On the first of December, as she crossed a meadow on a walk with Justine, Sarah spied a lone yellow butterfly darting among a few spindly dandelions and tiny white daisies still in bloom, and she was amazed to see the azalea on her window ledge in full flower until mid-December when it was finally struck down by the first frost.

December announced itself not with brittle sunlight and numbing cold but with ever diminishing days and increasing rain, always rain. It seemed to Sarah she barely got the children home, their boots, book bags, and coats removed, before night fell, and they took their snacks and spread out their schoolwork on the long hardwood table in the vast hearth room, sequestered by the darkness and rain. Sarah would go around the room switching on all the lamps and piling logs onto the fire. More than once the housekeeper complained to Madame de Beauharnais about this useless waste of electricity, and Victoria, ever frugal, would reprimand Sarah. But light was Sarah's weapon against depression, and she stubbornly persisted in her habits, leaving a trail of lighted lamps wherever she most frequently passed in the evenings, so that from the outside the south wing of the chateau shone brightly in the darkness.

In December Sarah began to work into her daily schedule an hour's rest on the worn sofa in the huge hearth room, the one where the dogs and children camped on Friday evenings to watch videos—this being the only room where a fire burned all through the day. Even if Fatima was running the vacuum or Madame was on the telephone at her desk in the far corner, Sarah would stretch out, cover herself with a wool throw, and go to sleep. The room was so vast and sounds so muffled by the encumbrance of massive book-covered tables and chairs and sideboards and hanging tapestries, that conversations were rarely overheard; neither were Sarah's light snores.

If Sarah had a champion that winter, it was Dr. Faure. It was he who urged Victoria to relieve Sarah of some of her duties, who insisted, in the later months of her pregnancy, she use Frederic's private elevator instead of the stairs, and who suggested Victoria provide her with a cell phone for use in case of emergency. Victoria, always a little slow to respond to the needs of her employees, was nevertheless accommodating, for she truly liked Sarah, found her particularly good with the children (even ten-year-old Henri, who had given such grief to their previous
au pairs)
and hoped she would stay on after her baby was born.

But the true test of this arrangement came in late December, only five days before Christmas. Sarah had driven the children in to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to ride the carousel and do some last-minute shopping. The excitement of Christmas hung in the air like the smell of snow. A giant pine tree decorated with huge floppy bows and shiny red ornaments the size of basketballs had been raised in the small
place
at the end of the Rue de Pologne, and garlands of flocked greenery woven with gold-and-silver ribbons decorated the doorways of
boucheries
and
boulangeries,
wine merchants and the Monoprix, and the fishmonger with his squid and raw oysters and salmon on white beds of cracked ice.

Always at this time of day the streets were full of shoppers, but never so many as in this season, and now they overflowed the sidewalks and spilled into the streets with their strollers and dogs and shopping caddies. The local beggars had their corner, and the harpist his, and the chestnut vendor had staked out a space for his coal brazier. There was always a bottleneck at that corner, and the smell of roasting chestnuts wafted all the way down the street.

It was five in the afternoon, and darkness had already fallen. Henri was gawking at a wild boar suspended from a hook next to the entrance of a butcher shop. Sarah suspected he was fondling the long needlelike fur and inspecting the snout and huge ears just to annoy Justine, and so she took the younger children by the hand and herded them on down the street toward a chocolate shop. All of a sudden she felt a painless rush of warmth between her legs, and she looked down to see bright, fresh blood trickling down her knee, staining her pale stockings. She called back to Henri, but he stubbornly ignored her, and she had to rush back to get him. He was only ten but he could tell by the look in her eyes as she hurried toward him that something was wrong, and then he saw her legs and he went white. Someone jostled him, and he got pushed aside, though he caught a glimpse of her face before she slipped to the ground. He heard someone cry out and he shoved his way through the shoppers and found her sprawled on the wet pavement, her bulky body blocking the way and the children beside her, Antoine pale and Justine wailing. Henri grabbed Justine by the hand and shook it hard and told her to be quiet, and then a lady from the
parfumerie
came out and helped Sarah inside. She was conscious when they sat her on a chair and Henri reminded her she had a cell phone in her purse. He dug it out but she was too weak to hold it, so he took it away from her and called home.

They were able to avert a miscarriage, but just barely. Two days later Sarah returned home. The children were out of school for the holidays and there was much excitement and much to do, but Sarah was confined to her bed. Only Justine was allowed up to her room, and Sarah read her Christmas stories and let her play with her watercolors. The housekeeper complained bitterly about the extra work, suggested Mademoiselle Bryden should be kept in the hospital where she could be tended to properly, or better yet, that she should return to her own country, that it did no good to hire someone to care for the children if she could not get out of bed, and that Madame de Beauharnais was being terribly inconvenienced by this turn of events. But Victoria had a soft spot for Sarah, so she turned a deaf ear to Madame Fleury and instructed the household to tend to Sarah's needs.

Their inconvenience was short-lived, however, for Joy arrived the day before Christmas with a suitcase full of macaroni and cheese, Oreos, two tins of Libby's canned pumpkin and evaporated milk to make pumpkin pies, candy canes and American videos for the children, two bottles of Sarah's favorite shampoo, and hastily wrapped presents from her grandfather and grandmother, all of which did Sarah a world of good.

Christmas dinner was a formal affair served in the grand dining room, but it was reserved for the immediate family. The employees had their own dinner service at the long table in the sprawling kitchen, and Sarah and Joy were invited to this, but Sarah could not leave her bed. So Joy carried up trays of food to her room, filled their plates full of foie gras and smoked salmon, took a little of the fish course and a lot of the turkey and chestnut dressing. She came back down later for the cheese and the traditional
b
û
che de No
ë
l,
and of course two good-sized pieces of her own pumpkin pie.

Joy laid out their feast on a small drop-leaf table covered with a white tablecloth and lit with a single red taper. They sat before the fire in Sarah's room and were happy like this, just the two of them.

"I can't believe they didn't invite you to eat with them," Joy said.

Sarah shrugged, cut off a bite of turkey. "I told you, that's the way she is."

"What if I hadn't been here? What would you have done?"

"They would have brought me something."

"Not that old Madame Fleury. She's got it in for you. She'd see you starve before she'd lift a finger."

Sarah shrugged again. "Really, I understand. They have so many people they entertain all year-round."

"Still, it's not very charitable. And that's what Christmas is all about."

Sarah set down her wineglass and smiled. "You're the best Christmas ever, Joy."

"Are you sure you should be drinking?"

"Absolutely. Just wine. The doctor prefers it to medication. 'A stitch in the cervix, bed rest, and wine,'" she mimicked lightheartedly. "That's what he said." But Joy could see from her eyes she was taking none of it lightly.

Later that evening she and Joy exchanged presents. Sarah watched from her bed while Joy unwrapped her gift—framed watercolors, one of the chateau and another of a spray of pink dog rose.

"Oh, Sarah." Joy sighed, her eyes wide with delight. She set the paintings on the mantelpiece where she could admire them. "These are beautiful. And to think that all those years, you never let anybody see anything you painted."

"John saw them."

Joy crossed the room and sat down at the foot of Sarah's bed.

"Did you ever write him?" she asked.

Sarah gave a light laugh and threw her hands up in the air. "What would I say to him?"

"That you need him."

"Do I?"

"Very much so."

"Your presence does me a lot more good than his would."

"That's different."

The mock cheer on Sarah's face gave way to a worried look. She reached for Joy's hand. "Oh, Joy, how could I possibly draw him back into my life again just to share this?"

Suddenly Joy could find no more words of reassurance; tears stung her eyes and she blinked wide and looked down at Sarah's hand in her own, hoping Sarah had not noticed.

Sarah hoisted herself up on an elbow and turned to Joy. "I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, I really don't, but I know this much: If I lose this baby, I'll be losing more than John's child. I'll be losing the person I most want to be."

There was a solemnness in Sarah's eyes that Joy had never seen, a kind of heartfelt confession of her own frailness.

"Oh, Sarah honey..."

"Without this child," her voice lowered to a pained whisper, "I'll be nothing. My life will be worthless."

"That's not true. Look at what you're doing now. Look at your beautiful paintings."

But Sarah only shook her head. "They don't mean anything."

"Sarah honey," Joy murmured, smoothing down her hair.

Sarah laid her head back on the pillow and slid her hand down her belly. "You know what I do? I keep track of every movement he makes and I write it down in that notebook." She gestured to the bedside table. "I write down the exact hour and minute. Every time he squirms or kicks. I do it even at night. That's why I don't sleep."

They were silent for a moment, and then Joy said, "Sarah, you need that man. You need him here, with you, now."

"Joy, have you forgotten he's married?"

"Well, maybe he won't be able to come. But you need to give him the chance."

Joy straightened, and a look of firm resolve spread over her face. She patted Sarah's hand. "You just let me take over from here."

The next day Joy called Clay and woke him up at three in the morning to tell him she'd be staying on in France for a while. Joy's sister had agreed to come in and run the cafe for her, but she'd need Amy to put in extra hours, and she wanted Clay to drop around whenever possible to keep an eye on things. Clay was bad-tempered about being awakened in the middle of the night by his ex-wife, was particularly annoyed by her inability to explain herself, but he was downright baffled by her refusal to say exactly when she would be home. He couldn't get back to sleep after that, just lay in bed until dawn, listened to the wind rise and watched the morning light creep in between the slats of the blinds. Then he got up and put on some coffee and sat in the kitchen wondering what could have prompted such foolhardy behavior in that woman. When he told Amy over breakfast, his daughter's head shot up from her bowl of cereal. She stared at him wide-eyed, milk dripping from her spoon, and breathed, "Oh my God, Mom's fallen in love."